Lower your Expectations for ED

[Cosmo]

Every year they spend developing something at "Odyssey pace" (i.e. "a few times slower than the players would like") means they need to sell well over 100,000 copies of the thing they developed at something approaching a £40 full release price, plus later discounted sales and ARX add-ons coming in later ... just to break even. Twice that would probably be the sales target to match the long-term average return on "spending money on Elite Dangerous".

Well those are estimates. They cut development of the console versions which lowers costs. ED's server costs are low compared to regular MMOs.

If there's something that Frontier could develop in a year and be confident that they could get 200,000 ED players to pay "new game" price for, I'm sure they'd be doing it: they certainly have the cash reserves to fund it. I have difficulty thinking of anything they could possibly do that quickly which would meet that requirement, though.

Exciting Thargoid content would bring a lot of old players back (and new ones).

I would still like to see frontier try to provide more justification to themselves to develop elite dangerous by being more creative with microtransactions.

Ship interiors being sold as ship kits is the most likely thing from a players perspective i can think of.

Yeah, the ship interiors with free and premium cosmetics would be lucrative microtransactions for Frontier. Perhaps also story driven mission packs as DLC. That makes it more justifiable from a business perspective than other stuff on people's wish lists.

 

[Christopher Roberto]

I'm not just talking about the physical servers - though if EDSM costs even a tenth of ED's server budget I'd be incredibly surprised - but also the staff needed to keep them all patched and running, support staff for account questions and handling reports, monitoring of ongoing processes like the BGS tick, etc.

That's not going to be less than £1M/year, and probably more like twice that once things like community managers, support for CGs, Galnet, and other ongoing but not directly chargeable things are accounted for as well.

On the physical server side of things, while it's possible that they've got some extreme maintenance and hardware requirements due to faults of their own, there's no reason it would be necessary. It's a thin server with few responsibilities (most of the things people think are done on the server are done on the client) handling an average of less than 5k players. The majority of the load will be loading data per systemaddress, and if you assume that you have 5,000 players all constantly jumping every 60 seconds and the payload for that is something ridiculous like 10k bytes for some reason, that's roughly 7Mbit of data. You could host that for free, and that's a worst case.

For the rest, I'd not list things like community managers, CGs, galnet, support tickets, etc. as they have similar for their single player dinosaur/car/zoo/coaster games. We were talking about the differences in cost between a single player game and a "MMO" earlier.

 

[Mersozz]

I love this game, and still acknowledge many of the criticisms of the game are valid.

There are other (space sim) games that are supposedly superior, and yet they aren't slated to be finished products for years. Just offering that by way of perspective.

Just throwing in my $0.02, I think a good way to proceed would be as follows:

1) Continue to optimize the visual experience.
2) Eliminate glitches.
3) Work on a brand new release

With respect to the new release, it should include the following:

3a) Porting over existing commander information, ranks, ships, etc.
3b) Migration of player factions and squadrons.
3c) New ships, vehicles, suits, station types, etc.
3d) NEW FEATURE: Player driven actions to flesh out stations, worlds, etc.... in other words, the ability for players to construct outposts, terraform planets, build surface installations, grow vegetation, raise animals, etc. ARX could be used to purchase expansions of outposts and surface bases (i.e., additional rooms, hallways, structures) and interior elements.

Instead of resigning to the premise that the galaxy will remain largely uniform, and "boring", challenge humanity (the players) to be the catalysts.

I'd drop some dough to help see what happens next.

 

[Chaparral]

People still buy Southwest Airlines tickets even though it is broken and untrustworthy.
In many cases, it is the only game in town.
This will persist until there are alternatives, or people stop buying their tickets from Southwest.

 

[Scorprox]

I support what Mersozz suggests.

And what if the storyline is already being pushed into that direction?
Thargoids conquering the milky way, mankind´s got to flee through maelstrom wormholes into a neighboring, much smaller galaxy.
New stellar forge RNG, a more compact universe, astonishing new POIs, dangerous dark matter areas, more hostile and also interesting friendly or neutral species,
less black emptyness around a new "player evolving" bubble, a couple of game misconcepts can be left behind because of hasty wild retreat...
and every single new space station or planet harbor needs to be built by a community goal, named and administrated.

and if that new game works out well one far day an interesting other event could take place: "return to milky way, mankinds abandoned home"

​

 

[Viajero]

Using the dreaded Steam charts (which is the only semi-reliable source of player involvement publicly available) suggests that nothing post Odyssey has really had that much effect.
View attachment 353140
The patient is dangerously close to flatlining

Just remember that anything past 6 months in that chart is not showing averages but absolute max peaks so the curve gives a bit of a false drop impression. To get a better picture look at the table figures below the chart. In it you will see that monthly averages in the last few months have been between 4000-5000, with some of the highest peaks since EDO launch this past Christmas. Average concurrency has been gradually increasing since the ~3500 lows right after EDO launch, and it is now at par with concurrency levels just before Fleet Carriers hype. Not too bad despite the EDO launch issues.

 

[metatheurgist]

Just remember that anything past 6 months in that chart is not showing averages but absolute max peaks so the curve gives a bit of a false drop impression. To get a better picture look at the table figures below the chart. In it you will see that monthly averages in the last few months have been between 4000-5000, with some of the highest peaks since EDO launch this past Christmas. Average concurrency has been gradually increasing since the ~3500 lows right after EDO launch, and it is now at par with concurrency levels just before Fleet Carriers hype. Not too bad despite the EDO launch issues.

Yep, FC seems to have been the most popular addition which stopped a year later. I assume people finished grinding for it by then. And in terms of actual things to do with it an FC makes Ody seem feature rich by comparison. But numbers seem as stable as they have ever been to me since before FC, despite all the DOOM claims.

 

[MUTILADOR]

Well, Elite was a passion project for DBOBE.
A game like ED, confined in a space nerdy niche, with a long running life and no subscriptions and no pay-to-win model, is not attractive for any publisher - simply because a publisher wants a GameDev studio to keep churning out games with an ending in sight (50-100h of gameplay) so the publisher can make money selling game after game

So FDev never found a publisher for Elite and they had to use their own money (and the small part that was the kickstarter) to develop and self publish the game.
Which was successful enough to get them enough cash so they could start working out other games

So you cannot say they didnt reinvested in their success since ED success allowed them to release a lot of other games, while still keeping ED running.
But again, they're a business and when ED will not be able to pay for it's running costs, they will have to shutdown the servers.

NMS is proof that you are totally wrong...
ED has great potential not being adequately tapped.

 

[Northpin]

NMS is proof that you are totally wrong...
ED has great potential not being adequately tapped.

Proof for what? That Hello Games owner is stuffing his pockets? (nothing wrong with that, mind you - it's actually his money)
NMS got total revenues between 40 and 80 millions, depending where you get the info.
That's a lot of money for a small private company and allows them to keep 10-20 people on the payroll for quite a loooong time.
So no wonder they can churn out "free" updates since their customers actually pre-paid them

They overhyped in the beginning and sold a crappy game and took them 2 years to improve
Kudos to them to actually improve the game and not running away with the initial 15-20 millions

As a comparison, ED made well in excess of 100 millions (i think it's about 120 millions, but obviously its running costs are much bigger than NMS' ones)
However, as ED scopes is bigger than NMS is, DBOBE scope was also bigger and he didn't stop at 1 game.
As a result, the good start that ED had managed to actually propel a gaming company that is publicly listed and currently is feeding 750+ employees and released a quite number of games, each of them being successful and each of them made quite a number of people happy.

Now about the ED's potential... what's that even mean?
ED is the game that DBOBE wants it to be, as much as possible it can be, based on the success it has.
And I'm really glad he didn't sell out and went on the path of going over-commercial, selling ships for money or things like that.
The man had a vision and kept with it.

And i happen to like DBOBE's game.
However, it may not be the game you want it to be, and that's also fine.


edit: typos

 

[Rat Catcher]

NMS is proof that you are totally wrong...

Or totally right, it is all perspective, isn't it?

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

My expectations went to rock bottom with engineers.

 

[thistle]

Proof for what? That Hello Games owner is stuffing his pockets? (nothing wrong with that, mind you - it's actually his money)
NMS got total revenues between 40 and 80 millions, depending where you get the info.
That's a lot of money for a small private company and allows them to keep 10-20 people on the payroll for quite a loooong time.
So no wonder they can churn out "free" updates since their customers actually pre-paid them

They overhyped in the beginning and sold a crappy game and took them 2 years to improve
Kudos to them to actually improve the game and not running away with the initial 15-20 millions

As a comparison, ED made well in excess of 100 millions (i think it's about 120 millions, but obviously its running costs are much bigger than NMS' ones)
However, as ED scopes is bigger than NMS is, DBOBE scope was also bigger and he didnt stopped at 1 game.
As a result, the good start that had ED managed to actually propel a gaming company that is publicly listed and currently is feeding 750+ employees and released a quite number of games, each of them being successful and each of them made quite a number of people happy.

Now about the ED's potential... what's that even mean?
ED is the game that DBOBE wants it to be, as much as possible it can be based on the success it has.
And i'm really glad he didnt sell out to go on the path of going over-commercial, selling ships for money or things like that.
The man had a vision and kept with it.

And i happen to like DBOBE's game.
However, it may not be the game you want it to be, and that's also fine.

This.

 

[sutex]

Elite Dangerous share holders are the only ones with expectations!, these days

 

[Old Duck]

NMS is proof that you are totally wrong...
ED has great potential not being adequately tapped.

I think Sean Murray actually and deeply cares about NMS as not just a product, but a dream / vision. Perhaps it was the same with Elite in the very early days, but now all Frontier wants to tap is your wallet.

That's not to say there aren't still passionate employees at Frontier, as I'm sure Alec would attest to. But a passionate employee does not make a passionate company, as I can attest to from first-hand experience.

* This is all conjecture of course, just like the "David loves Elite Dangerous with all his heart, mind, and soul!" claims. Believe what you will and invest accordingly.

 

[babelfisch]

Why did nobody turn this thread into a discussion about Steamcharts yet? Amateurs.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

You can't really compare a game that made constant updates , expanding the gameplay quite massively with a cookie-cutter one trick pony whose only idea of gameplay is piling on boring grindjobs for powercreep items.

 

[Phoenix_Dfire]

So its the usual arguments here then?

a couple of reminders though ;-

a) DB-OBE will never let anyone else have Elite. It's been his baby since 1984, and he's the only one that continued to develop it afterwards (see Frontier and FFE). So unless something happens to him Elite is going nowhere.
b) Yes, Odyssey was a hit on the Fdev Financials, but they've managed to absorb the costs without the company going into the red. The console versions were cancelled but it was obvious (with 20-20 hindsight) that they wouldn't be able to handle processing power required by Odyssey.
c) Elite was a 7 year old game when Odyssey was released and there was a graphical update (which is one of the reasons for the performance issues) which has brought it closer to modern graphics. However when you think about it, try running a modern game now on the same hardware you had seven years ago; unless you were at the bleeding cutting edge, you won't be able to.
d) As far as the future is concerned, we have updates 15 and 16 coming (which I suspect will be narrative conclusion to the Thargoid War) and that's going to keep us going until the end of the year at least (I suspect). After that there is the feature re-write. So, as long as fdev don't go bust (which is unlikley), We've got plenty of content incoming.
e) According to steam charts, we've had steady player numbers for quite a while. Obviously we've lost a lot of console players but the player base on PC is not shirking (although we don't know the full figures).

I do feel there is a little NMS envy. I see what Hello Games have done with that game and wish that ED could match it (Yes, I'd like to see Odyssey VR, base building, ship interiors, new planets, etc) , but those that think Fdev don't care about this game have never met any of the Developers.

Dammit, you lot have got me ranting again. These forums do make me grumpy!

 

[Frankymole]

For them to figure out what went wrong, there would have to be something for them to figure out. Elite 84 had Clean, Offender, Fugitive states. ED has Clean and Wanted.

The 84 game crime system had 50% more detail than the modern game! Systems are supposed to improve with further development, not go backwards!

Don't remember it having bounties on individual ship components. So, complexity has increased, at least.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

Yawn. Is it dead yet? I am pretty sure you can find posts about the deadness of the game dating back to 2014.

You don't have to lower your expectations, you have to manage them. As long as your expectations are in the realm of unicorns and fairy dust, there is nothing other than disappointment waiting for you.

Lower expectations?

If you have high expectations you should talk to someone about it. We know close to nothing about the update (15). Where are your expectations based on?
The only one being hyped here is you. I can not lower what I do not have.

I am content with what there is at the moment. I am looking forward to the new update. Whatever it may be. It might be that I find the update irrelevant to me. Since nothing gets removed there would logically be no impact to my experience.

You might be the wisest poster in this thread so far.

 

[amigacooke]

a couple of reminders though ;-

a) DB-OBE will never let anyone else have Elite. It's been his baby since 1984, and he's the only one that continued to develop it afterwards (see Frontier and FFE). So unless something happens to him Elite is going nowhere.

Not so sure about that one:

Frontier acquires Elite rights as Braben readies share sale​